Kennerley investigates the relationship between tradition and historical criticism in France during the earliest years of the Reformation. Its key sources are two polemics between Josse Clichtove ...(1472–1543) and Noël Beda (c. 1470–1537) over the cult of Mary Magdalene and the Exultet hymn. A student of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, Clichtove enunciated modern‐sounding criticisms of received traditions. His opponent Beda is instead famous for his scholastic defences of inherited doctrine against humanists like Clichtove and Erasmus. Drawing on an in‐depth reading of Clichtove and Beda's tracts, this essay will contextualize the clashes between these two scholars and analyse their respective methods and conclusions. While demonstrating the sophistication of Clichtove's historical thought and Beda's own surprising skill as a historian, this essay will contend that the central issue of these polemics was not history, but whether tradition was a legitimate subject for historical criticism. It will conclude by considering the implications of these polemics for the study of sacred history in the Reformation, as shown in the change of Clichtove's method after his conflict with Beda.
The article presents a detailed commentary on the famous statement of Rodion Raskolnikov, which actualizes the ambivalent semantics of the images of the “trembling creature” and the prophet. As the ...results of the narrative and textual analysis of “Crime and Punishment” show, this feature of word usage makes it possible to differentiate between the positions of the author and the hero. The article also proves that in the canonical text by Dostoevsky Raskolnikov’s thought is framed as a “foreign word,” graphically and punctuationally marked, as indicated by quotation marks, italics, an initial colon and an exclamation mark at the end. In the quoted text, Raskolnikov’s exclamation and the direct speech of the prophet in the interpretation of the hero of the novel alternate twice. The article shows how the author exposes his position to crushing “plot criticism,” debunking Raskolnikov’s religious and moral mistakes, including the opposition of Christ to Mohammed, which the author eliminates in the epilogue of the novel by mentioning Abraham, “the father of all believers.” His figure is a key one in the system of historical and spiritual kinship of the three world religions. In the context of anthropology and genealogy of the Sacred History, Raskolnikov’s last vision symbolizes his return to the “bosom of Abraham.” The hero, like a prudent robber in one of the variants of the iconographic plot, seems to be next to the “forefather.” As a result of the conducted historical, cultural and textual analysis, the author concludes that Dostoevsky, following Pushkin, reproduced the effect of the hero’s co-existence with the main figures of Sacred History in his novel.
When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a ...model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that in the wake of the Decade of the Brain and the best-selling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.
Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain chronicles and unravels historiographical strands made of the complicated lives and afterlives of a set of manuscripts and printed ...books in defense of the Spanish church and its saints and martyrs against the Roman post-Tridentine reform of Christian sacred history. Olds studies one particular Jesuit historian, Jerónimo Román de la Higuera (1538–1611) and his notorious "falsos cronicones," in which he rewrote and invented historical archives in order to prove the antiquity of Spanish Christianity. Olds's enticing narrative and thorough research prove the point that forgery is also a "mode of historical writing," and the only reproach one might level at this fine book is the narrow focus on Spain when it comes to discussing the reception of the Chronicles. Reading this book, however, inspires and raises larger questions, including the use of forgeries for patriotic (national) histories and the ethics of historical scholarship. By looking into recent statements by Sheldon Pollock, a philologist and intellectual historian of South Asia, and by Hayden White in his recent The Practical Past, this article argues that in spite of their different methodologies, they both converge in defining the task of a historian as doing something other than supporting national, patriotic, technocratic, and "market-oriented" agendas.
As part of a Christian-Buddhist-Muslim trialogue on comparative theological concepts, this article examines Islamic conceptions of both myth and history in relation to different theological ...conceptions of time. Focused particularly on a comparison with Jewish and Christian traditions, this article argues that myth, while present in the Islamic tradition, plays a comparatively minor role, and one that does not align with some theoretical conceptions of how myth functions in other religious traditions. By contrast, history, as the arena of God's agency in the world, is as important and well developed in Islam as it is in Judaism and Christianity. Unlike these latter two traditions, however, the Islamic and especially Qur'anic conception of sacred history is not only structured on a predominantly linear, progressive conception of time, but also considers historical time as unfolding in cyclical and circular patterns. The effect is a more variegated conception of theological time, which effectively blurs the lines between myth, sacred history, and religious/communal history.
Mercedarian friar Luis de Cisneros wrote a chronicle on Our Lady of Remedios, first patroness of Mexico City that was published in 1621. Significantly, that same year Augustinian friar Alonso Ramos ...Gavilán's history on Our Lady of Copacabana, patroness of Peru and Bolivia, was printed in Lima. This paper compares these two founding accounts, not only in their literary structures, but also their patronage, and reception. It also ponders how both cults aimed to integrate both Spaniards and Indigenous peoples under one symbolic figure-the mother of God-as a key element for the consolidation of colonial society, not by coincidence, one of the key goals of the local Church councils that took place in the 1580s.
This paper studies how Early Modern Spanish historians confronted the problem of calculating the equivalence between the Christian Era and the Hegira. Chronological polemics concerning the Hegira ...were deeply embedded in a major historiographical problem, namely the role Islam and al-Andalus played in the history of Spain. Besides the technical issues, chronology is one of the most important ways by which an Islamic Iberian past was integrated in a narrative about national history. Once Islam became a historical actor for Spanish and European historians, rather than just a religion to confront, very important questions were raised: were Arabic sources necessary for the writing of Spanish history? What were these sources, and what was their value? Since al-Andalus was connected with the more general problem of the relationship of ancient Spain with the Orient (and, specifically, with the Biblical Orient), the chronological argument became a major issue in reflections on the limits and possibilities of writing the sacred history of Spain.
The term "priestcraft" became fashionable in the 1690s. This essay explores its use among the anti-clericals in John Locke's circle and examines the critique of priestcraft in his own Reasonableness ...of Christianity (1695). The commentaries and church histories, in correspondence and published treatises, of Benjamin Furly, William Popple, Damaris Masham, William Stephens, and Sir Robert Howard are examined. The Lockean circle remained committed to Christian revelation and, for the most part, to a reformed Church of England, and it is argued that it is a mistake to identify the critique of priestcraft exclusively with deism and the subversion of Christianity. The polemical critique of the priestly deformations of Christianity, though often scabrously hostile to clergies, served equally the ecclesiastical and political causes of post-Revolution latitudinarian Anglicanism. The Lockean circle was committed to constructing a Church Whig ecclesiology.
This paper studies the way in which Early Modern Spanish historiography dealt with Al-
Andalus, and how it tried to integrate it into the framework of Spanish national history. I criticize the ...narratives linked to the “Reconquista” (both critical and apologetic), and argue how Al-Andalus was connected to a more general idea of the Biblical Orient, that was used to write the sacred history of Spain. Finally, I try to show how this idea became part of the 17th-century Spanish critical thought.
El presente artículo estudia el tratamiento que la historiografía española de época Moderna dio a Al-Andalus, y cómo la integró en una narración de la historia nacional. En él, trato de ir más allá de la narrativa, apologética o crítica, de la “Reconquista”, y muestro cómo Al-Andalus se asocia a una idea del Oriente bíblico relacionada con la escritura de la historia sagrada, que acaba introduciéndose en el pensamiento crítico del s. XVII.
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